DARWIN FISH. The Washington Times celebrates Darwin's birthday with an essay by Jonathan Wells. His theme:

For most people, science means testing hypotheses by comparing them with the evidence. For Darwin and his followers, however, "science" became the search for natural explanations...

Actually, Darwinism has always been more philosophy than science. Darwin called "The Origin of Species" "one long argument," and it took the following form: The features of living things are "inexplicable on the theory of creation" but fully explicable as products of unguided natural forces. Darwin lacked sufficient evidence for the latter, however, so he ruled out the former by simply declaring that only natural explanations are "scientific."

The difference between science and "science" is apparently that the latter, for willfully evil reasons, does not accept supernatural explanations, as they did in the dear old days before "scientists" started messing around in labs, observatories, and nature preserves.

Wells also tells us that "once in power Darwinism (like Marxism) tolerates no dissent" -- a hedge planted, as it were, so that if opponents mention that Wells is a zealous adherent of the Unification Church, whose messiah, Sun Myung Moon, also founded the Washington Times, they are just Marxistically trying to assassinate his character ("scientists and teachers who criticize Darwinism risk ostracism, character assassination and termination of their employment"). But some of my favorite people, and not a few evolutionists, have sky-gods and, being a generous soul, I am glad for Wells that he has a creed that helps him understand his place in the world, and a publisher/prophet who helps him get there.

The connection is more interesting for what it says about culture-war issues, such as Darwin has become, within the current conservative universe. These days you'll rarely find the more upper-class conservatives arguing that God didn't make them from no monkeys. Full-throated Darwin denialism is largely left to populist crackpots like Ann Coulter and fringe figures of the sort described by Alternative Tulsa. More thoughtful conservatives will try to explain to their backward brethren that Darwin is OK for conservatives, and often via the gambit that evolution is rationalist and therefore part of the Way of the West patriots must defend, or by the old dog-medicine-in-Alpo trick of telling them that Darwin is actually conservative.

You'll see a lot of this sort of thing tomorrow, as the Darwin birthday bandwagon rolls. Back when the first Bush bank bailout came, a lot of conservatives demurely dropped their free-market principles; now that the stimulus (philosophically consonant, alas, with the bailouts) has been adopted by Obama, you see them mouthing some of the old platitudes, but only as an obstructionist stunt. No one believes it, but it has to be done. As tools to rescue the economy, these things are clusterfucks, but as cultural totems they are only good or bad depending on what trench you happen to be fighting from.

Just so with Darwin. In their politically degenerate phase, conservatives can loosen up about him -- there's not much powder or provender there in the Age of Obama; no need to play dumb. When a stimulus moment arrives, they'll have the option of putting the masks back on, and you'll see Jonathan Wells and Ben Stein and all those guys riding on the top of the float again. It's sort of like the routine done at Big Hollywood and in other such conservative movie games -- denouncing film as a liberal plot at one end of the mood swing, declaring film a conservative phenomenon at the other -- but played out much more slowly over a longer period of time, as befits the evolutionary model.